Help Line: U.S. WSJ Readers Aid India TB Victim

Rahima Sheikh’s yearslong effort to beat tuberculosis left her, in the end, all but untreatable. She displays scans in the Mumbai slum she shared with her husband and daughter.

MUMBAI–In September, when Rahima Sheikh almost ran out of the medicines holding her strain of tuberculosis in check, a man more than 7,000 miles away came to her rescue.

Anjul Srivastava, a software engineer living in the San Fransisco area, read about Mrs. Sheikh’s struggle to get cured of her TB, which is resistant to traditional medicines, in a front page story in The Wall Street Journal. He called her, offering to help.

In the ensuing weeks, Mr. Srivastava sent $400 to Mrs. Sheikh in her village in India’s northern state of Uttar Pradesh. He also guided other readers wanting to help. Mrs. Sheikh used the money to buy medicines while she awaited the weeks-late government shipment.

A month later, in October, when The Wall Street Journal reported that Mrs. Sheikh’s supply of medicines from the government was again running out, a reader in another part of the U.S. jumped in to help. John O. “Chip” Moore, owner of a home mortgage company in Birmingham, Alabama, sent her $1,000 for more medicines and to buy back the rice field she had mortgaged when she needed cash for drugs years ago. Mrs. Sheikh confirmed the receipt of both donations.

Shiv Rao, a banker who lives in New York City, says he was also moved to help Mrs. Sheikh. He says he convinced a non-government organization helping drug-resistant TB patients in India to take his donation of $500 and earmark it for medicines for Mrs. Sheikh while he and his friends put together a larger donation “to stop untreatable TB expanding its reach.”

Mrs. Sheikh’s struggle, and the unexpected help from abroad, show the ability of individuals from across the world to save a person’s life where government bureaucracy fails.

“We can’t even believe this has happened to us, that someone who doesn’t know us from so far away has been so generous,” Mrs. Sheikh said on hearing of the latest donation. “God is great.”

Mrs. Sheikh, 40, who has three children, has been trying for six years to get cured of TB. But instead of getting cured, her disease became more drug resistant with each failed treatment.

Having mortgaged her rice field and spent her extended family’s savings, Mrs. Sheikh finally ended up at the clinic of one of India’s top TB experts in Mumbai in January. He reported early this year that a dozen patients, including her, had a strain of the disease that is resistant to virtually all traditional treatments.

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John O. Moore Jr. was moved to help Mrs. Sheikh after reading about her plight in the WSJ.

The reports of what her physician called “total drug resistance” spurred the local and national governments here into action. Mumbai’s government announced it would provide free medicines to patients like Mrs. Sheikh, and she soon started on an experimental regimen including medicines for leprosy and psychosis that has held her disease in check for six months. The central government said it would rapidly scale up treatment for multi-drug resistant TB and more virulent strains, like hers, that take at least two years and cost more than $2,000 to treat.

TB is the infection that kills the most adults in India, which has the most cases per year of the disease in the world: 2.2 million. India is now trying to tackle a problem it has been slow to address: the rise and spread of multi-drug resistant forms of the disease. The government estimates there are about 100,000 cases of multi-drug resistant TB, but the real number is not known.

Mrs. Sheikh couldn’t afford to continue to live in Mumbai, so she returned in July to her village in Uttar Pradesh with a month’s supply of medicines. When her medicines ran out, officials in her district said they couldn’t help because their program to treat drug-resistant tuberculosis hadn’t yet started. Mumbai officials agreed to send more medicines by courier.

They couldn’t do it immediately, however. The Sheikhs couldn’t buy the medicines themselves, having depleted their savings during their years seeking treatment for her. Mr. Sheikh had stopped working at his job in Mumbai sewing men’s pants to take his wife to their home village. The medicines cost 5,000 rupees a month, or $100, to buy from a private pharmacy.

Mrs. Sheikh was desperate because she knew even short interruptions in treatment allow the TB bacteria to mutate into more drug resistant forms.

That is when Mr. Srivastava, a native of India, stepped in, sending her $400. He began calling Mrs. Sheikh and her husband every few days to check on them. He was provided with Mrs. Sheikh’s contacts by The Wall Street Journal after receiving permission from Mrs. Sheikh.

With his donation, Mrs. Sheikh bought medicines for three weeks until Mumbai’s government sent the drugs she’s now taking. Mr. and Mrs. Sheikh also used some of the money to buy train tickets to Kanpur, one of the biggest cities in their state, where she got a checkup from a private doctor who had treated her years earlier. They paid for TB tests he recommended.

But the latest batch of medicines, too, is running out. Earlier this month, Mumbai officials refused to send more, telling Mrs. Sheikh to return to the city so they could monitor her treatment. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that she had only 10 days of medicine left and no money to buy more.

Ashok Kumar, head of the Indian government’s tuberculosis program, when contacted about Mrs. Sheikh’s predicament, directed Mumbai TB officials to send Mrs. Sheikh six months supply of her medicines. “It is our duty to help this woman,” he said.

Mumbai TB officials confirmed they had received Dr. Kumar’s directive Oct. 11 and said they were sending the medicines by courier. One week later, Oct. 18, the officials sent the medicines by courier to Mrs. Sheikh. They had yet to reach her on Friday but she was no longer frantic, even though her government supply runs out in three days. She’s used some of Mr. Moore’s donation to buy a week of medicines from a pharmacy in Gorakhpur, a big city an hour away.

Mr. Moore said he was moved to help Mrs. Sheikh after reading about how hard she had fought to get well. “I felt a little bit of help and engagement from someone would reinvigorate her not to quit,” he said.

“I tell my son’s football team that we’re all about tenacity and that’s just the example that this lady has set–her tenacity in not giving up is what inspired me,” Mr. Moore said in an interview Tuesday night, having just finished coaching The Dolphins, his 11-year-old son’s American football team.

Mr. Moore emailed a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, who put him in touch with Mr. Srivastava of San Francisco, who had been in telephone contact with the Sheikhs since sending them money a month earlier.

Mr. Srivastava, who sends money regularly to his mother in India, explained to Mr. Moore on email how to navigate the international wire transfer system to get his donation to Mrs. Sheikh.

Mr. Moore drove to a Publix grocery store nearby that has a Western Unionnter and put down $1,000 in cash.

Once he knew Mr. Moore had sent the money, Mr. Srivastava, who speaks Hindi, which Mr. Moore does not, telephoned Mr. Sheikh to tell him to go to Western Union. Mr. Sheikh had never heard of Western Union and had no idea where to find a branch. Mr. Srivastava researched on the Internet and gave Mr. Sheikh the address of a branch at a post office 20 miles away.

“I have never had such an experience before and I will probably never have it again.”

Shreya Shah/The Wall Street Journal

Rahima Sheikh on the roof of her home in Bhatni Haraiya.

Mrs. Sheikh, buoyed by the gift, said she felt well enough for the first time in two years to go for an evening walk with her husband that night. As they tread slowly down the dirt paths between the small brick houses of their village, the couple whispered to one another about how they would spend the money.

They agreed they would use $600 to buy back the rice field they had mortgaged for her medicines two years ago; and they would keep the rest, about $400, to buy her TB medicines whenever the government’s supply was late again.

The next morning, Mr. Srivastava was on the phone with them, urging them to also consider buying fencing and raising chickens so Mrs. Sheikh could eat more protein.

“He’s become an adviser to us now, this Hindu gentleman who lives in America,” said Mr. Sheikh, who is Muslim, about Mr. Srivastava, whose family is Hindu. “I never imagined a man from some other part of the world who is not even from my religion would take so much time to talk to us and to help us.”

Mr. Srivastava said the fact that Mrs. Sheikh is Muslim is one of many reasons he decided to help. “I thought help coming from a Hindu family would be encouraging to a minority Muslim family, especially if their local community got word of it. Of course these points pale against the sheer self-interest of containing a contagious, lethal bacteria before it reaches my family or American shores.”

Mr. Srivastava also could not contain his admiration for the speed with which Mr. Moore, who has no ties to India, had rushed to help Mrs. Sheikh.

“I really admire him for moving so fast, without regard for a tax deduction or anything–and trying to help this lady halfway across the world,” Mr. Srivastava said. “Someone needs to roll up their sleeves and get in there until the government systems are up and running.”

As a gesture of thanks, Mr. Srivastava sent a care package to Mr. Moore with gifts for his family. For Mr. Moore’s children, who are 11 and 14 years old, Mr. Srivastava sent a movie—“Kiki’s Delivery Service” — about a teenager finding her role in society. And for all of them, Mr. Srivastava sent a copy of the book he’s been devouring. It is “Poor Economics,” a tome on how to fight global poverty that he hopes will help Mr. Moore’s family make sense of Mrs. Sheikh’s plight halfway around the world.

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